Quentin Stambaugh thinks it was a Sunday morning in early June 12 years ago that the strange car pulled into the driveway of his ranch home in the Pigeon Hills, just over the hill from where he grew up and has spent all his life.
He saw them pull up, two men in a nondescript car, and he met them in the driveway. It was early, but he is an early riser. He looked at them and they looked at him. He knew why they were there.
“I knew exactly what happened,” he said. “I knew it was bad.”
They had bad news – his grandson, Cameron Stambaugh, his hunting and fishing buddy, a young man who idolized him and who had signed up for the military, in part, to honor his service, was dead, killed in Afghanistan. He was one of six members of the 93rd Military Police Battalion killed when an improvised explosive device ripped through their patrol vehicle in Maidan Shahr, a town nestled in the mountains southwest of Kabul.
He slammed his fist on the hood of his pickup truck, leaving a dent.
He reflects on it even now, as he enters his second century on this planet.